'My Adviser Stole My Research'

Kelly West for The Chronicle

Padmapriya Ashokkumar, a former Ph.D. student at the U. of Nebraska at Lincoln, is suing her former adviser and other faculty members in the computer-science program. She has accused her adviser of plagiarizing her research, and other professors of refusing to serve on her committee.

By Stacey Patton

Much of the conversation about plagiarism in academe focuses on
professors who steal from their scholarly equals. But growing
pressures to publish, particularly in the sciences, can also
increase the temptation for professors to defraud their graduate
students, some scholars say.

Graduate students and their advisers spend long, intense
stretches of time working together on research experiments and
publications. But those collaborations sometimes disintegrate into
competition over